Interesting post on the forums today (long read)

It's a good read but it's basically overhauling the entire game I think. I crapped my pants when I read his item affixes though, they look so good. Chance to cast twice, chance on hit to kill. Game needs more interesting shit like that even if it's wayyyyy overpowered.

i dont think theres anything they can do to that game that will ever get me to play it again. i dont even think an expansion will interest me. i play games for the story and the re playability, D3 had very little of both in my opinion.

I cant be asked to read thousands of words for a game that will never get good. It pains me to see the amount of effort being put forth that will simply be ignored by the big guns.

Actually it got a blue response which amounted to very little unfortunately. They disagree about some fundamental issues, things that worked out really well in diablo 2. Effectively their response was to continue to work within the current system and don't expect any radical changes that the game sorely needs.

Actually it got a blue response which amounted to very little unfortunately. They disagree about some fundamental issues, things that worked out really well in diablo 2. Effectively their response was to continue to work within the current system and don't expect any radical changes that the game sorely needs.

You're right, they will always avoid drastic changes I think. But what he says gives me some hope for the long-term at least. The bit about items dropping less often but being more useful is cool. The problem I have with the game is that 99% of items are junk because the stats cant be utilized by most builds, and the range of the rolls is too great.

If they could make just 10% of the items usable vs. 1%, then I'd be happy.

Oh, and much more unique stats of course. The bit about being able to walk through enemies via a legendary affix is a good start.

Will Travis Day Save Diablo 3?

Good read, you know Im not a fan of D3 in its current state. But Travis has my interest peaked, maybe hope is not lost for some of us

Travis Day On The Salvation of Diablo 3
A very well received topic on Battle.net, about the flaws and possible fixes of Diablo 3, that garnered lots of feedback caught the attention of game designer Travis Day. Here are his thoughts on the different subjects.

Challenge

Challenge is certainly something that has value; players can’t feel a sense of accomplishment if everything in the game can be face rolled. I think many people would agree that, at launch, the game was too challenging. It was very difficult to progress through Inferno depending on your class or items and the challenge was a large part of the reason players felt like they were driven to the AH in the first place. When you present players with difficult content they will find a way to overcome it which usually means using only the most powerful items and abilities. The unfortunate side effect is it also drives players away from the play styles they feel are “just fun”. We have taken steps to improve this problem a number of ways; reducing the overall difficulty of Inferno, improving the potency of underused skills to allow players more diversity in their gameplay, and introducing Monster Power to allow players to set the game to a level which they feel is enjoyable. I think the right way to introduce challenge is to make it optional, for example having difficult content for the players that enjoy it without penalizing the players who prefer a more relaxed gameplay experience.

Items and AH

Items are a topic with a tremendous amount of depth and also a very sensitive subject, so I’ll do my best to provide some of our insights into the matter. Removing “bad” affixes is certainly a suggestion that surfaces from time to time, another suggestion is to group all the good affixes into a shared category so that they can’t all roll on the same item. I think on the surface those sound good but the reality of what they would do to the itemization isn’t what we want. I addressed the topic of the “bad” affixes in a prior post about items so I won’t go into too much more detail here, but I think it’s well within our ability to make those affixes compelling for some people, Pickup Radius and Witch Doctors are a good example of this. Specifically as it relates to Thorns, no one will disagree that in its current state is pretty lackluster, but it supports a play style that I’m sure we can capture with enough alterations to both the core mechanic and some supporting class abilities and passives.

As it relates to bucketing affixes so Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Attack Speed are mutually exclusive, yeah that would add more choice to item selection, but it would be artificial. I think this issue has some underlying causes that we should look at before going to the extreme of preventing them from existing on the same item. One of the first reasons trifecta items are an issue isn’t that they are so good; it’s that they are the only thing that is good. Of course you want the only three stats that increase your character damage in a meaningful way on the same item, because there are ONLY three stats that increase your character damage in a meaningful way other than your primary stat. I don’t want to derail this by getting into why primary stats were introduced or debate whether they are good or bad. I do want to say that Diablo 3 has been through much iteration during which a vast number of approaches to stats and items were tested and in the end we felt primary stats were the right thing for Diablo 3. I think a better approach to this issue is to introduce more affixes that players are interested in, so there is a sense of tension over what the six affixes are on your “ideal gear”. When a perfect pair of gloves is “Core Stat, Vit, Res All, Crit Chance, Crit Dmg, Attack Speed” and you can’t even imagine another stat you would want instead of one of those, we have a bigger problem. Introducing more choice instead of less and giving players more ways to feel like they are customizing their character is what we want to see. If gloves also had the ability to roll +% School Damage, +Life on Hit, Skill specific affixes, plus a couple more things you want, than players may find themselves in a situation where trifecta isn’t as clearly defined anymore.

The “problem” with trifecta items can’t be discussed without also pointing out that it is only a problem because the AH makes obtaining these items so easy. On a basic level, I have no problem with items existing that players highly desire, but when it is a forgone conclusion that you will have those items then we have problems. If the auction house never existed, players wouldn’t be upset that trifecta exists, they would be upset that they haven’t been lucky enough to find their own trifecta items. To summarize, I think the right solution to this problem isn’t cutting trifecta items from the game, but rather it’s about getting to a point where you want more things than you can fit on an item.

I think your affix ideas are cool, and we have spent a lot of time lately talking about what kind of awesome effects we could put on items that we don’t currently have. I’d even say that as cool as some of these ideas are, we can go even further. We are putting a lot of effort into coming up with really awesome item ideas for future content. I’ll give one quick example of my personal favorite so far before moving on and also to give context to the direction we are moving in. Imagine a pair of Legendary boots that read “Makes you ethereal, allowing you to freely move through enemies”. Whether or not that idea makes the final cut is hard to say, but we want to really push the boundaries as much as we can, so legendary items become things that players can get really excited about.

Character Customization

Your system idea for Nephalem Power Stat is basically a roundabout way of suggesting we re-implement the Diablo 2 skill system. The old skill system was fun, back in the day, but I think it’s honestly dated in today’s landscape. People fondly remember making tons of characters and trying out different builds, and while I have a lot of those same fond memories, I also remember that usually the end result of my time investment in my “cool new character” was complete and utter disappointment.
Today the availability of web sites or posts about character builds would mostly overshadow any of that old character rerolling. You would read a post saying someone else tried the build that you had imagined would be amazing, only to find out it was awful, or you would find out it was great and build it also. The skill system today allows people the flexibility to try out things they enjoy without penalizing players who want to experiment with new ideas. The only difference is if their idea doesn’t pan out, you didn’t waste hours leveling a bad character.

Character customization is fun. People want more ways to feel different from their neighbor, and we want to help provide players with more options in this regard as well. There are lots of things that we have discussed and some ideas we have for long term system additions to the game to help in this regard. One of them which I mentioned in another post is the plan to eventually introduce a system to allow players to customize their character appearance more. Another system we haven’t talked about before is the long term plan to change the way the Paragon system works to allow it to offer more character customization in the form of actual power. The details of that system are still being worked out and players probably won’t get their hands on it for quite a while. We do agree that customization is important and we want more ways for players to both express themselves and differentiate themselves from their friends and other members of the community.

Too many items

I cover this topic in some depth in the upcoming Item Blog that community is in the process of getting ready for release next week. I will briefly say that we agree that too many items drop and we have plans to eventually reduce the rate that players see items, while also taking measures to improve the general quality of items you do see. The end result should be fewer items that are better instead of tons of items you don’t want.

Legendary and Set items

This is a topic I’ve touched on some in this thread and it is also a talking point of the upcoming Item Blog, so I’ll just say that we agree and we want Legendary items to feel game changing.

Finding your own gear

Whenever we talk about what the fantasy of Diablo is and what we want the core gameplay to be, never do we say “we want players to farm gold and go buy items off the auction house”. The AH definitely has made an impact on Diablo 3 and we talk about it constantly, but our conversations are usually in the context of “how can we get players to find their own loot instead of just buying it”. The new crafting recipes and Demonic Essences were added to provide a little bit of this gameplay but we have a lot of ideas for the long term about how we want to go about addressing this. At the end of the day, it is our intention that players are able to find their own items, because we feel the game is just more fun that way. There are several reason why it might not feel that way right now. One is the inherent randomness of our loot system. Another is the fact that the AH completely removes all friction between player trades. And another is when players DO find items they should be excited about, they are often disappointed because this items are not very good. All of these are very important and we hope to address them over time.

Skill Diversity

This is something we constantly strive to improve. Yes, there are a lot of runes and abilities that are lacking, but as you can see with our patches, we try over time to improve the balance of them regularly. In some cases runes are designed just to be fun or cool. In other cases, we try to make a large spectrum of runes competitive, but the math ends up favoring one over the others. In some cases, certain abilities or ability combinations are so potent that they overshadow almost every other option available. WW/Sprint/Battle Rage is a good example of this. There are some cool ideas here, but I don’t want to turn this post into a discussion about specifics of design. This is a problem that we can’t fix overnight, but we are confident that over time we can constantly improve the situation and hopefully the community can see that we are making efforts on this front with every patch we release.
Crafting
What crafting was meant to be and what it ended up being aren’t necessarily the same. Again there are a long list of reasons why it turned out to be a bit underwhelming for some people. Not the least of which is the existence of the AH. Why make random things when you can buy exactly what you are looking for? We are constantly exploring new ideas for how to make crafting more relevant and trying to carve out a more defined role for it within the scope of Diablo 3 itemization. We have discussed ideas such as letting players have some control over what stats will appear on the item they are crafting, using the crafting system to allow players to reroll the values of affixes an item already has, etc. This is a system that, with time, should be able to find a better place in the overall gameplay experience of Diablo.

Social Features

This is an area that has a lot of room for improvement. I personally used to talk about the fact that when I would play with my brother and two of my good friends, I constantly felt like they were a detriment to my ability to farm, which is at the core of my enjoyment of the Diablo series. Since then, we have made changes to improve the coop experience like reducing the health multiplier of additional players and removing the damage scaling when more players join the game. However, we need to do more to improve both the in and out of game experience. We want it to be easier for players to find other like-minded people to play with and this is a topic we are actively trying to improve in the near future.

Conclusion

Ok I’ve reread this thing enough times that my brain is starting to melt. The Diablo team is incredibly passionate and constantly striving to make the game we love even better. I hope this post helps clear the air about where we stand on a lot of these topics and I also hope I never find myself never feeling the need to write a post this long again lol.

He makes a lot of good and well thought out points, especially regarding the challenge aspect of the game, and how team play could be handled.

I personally think it would have been unbelievably cool to implement jumping into this game (though I know some classes can pull it off), and have the environments built to reflect that ability. Folks would probably yell that "it's not Diablo anymore", but the possibilities would be pretty fantastic.

This game doesn't need any save or help or anything.
- it has been sold for +12mil of copies, it has been played,
- the RMAH gave them alot of money (probably),
- patches are making community to come back for a while and play,
- about 12k heroes have 100 paragon level, that's alot. Think thank only a part of playerbase has done it.

They are calmly making and expansion, witch will 99% sure sell like 8mil copies, ppl will come back, RMAH again, maybe some new systems will make ppl stay longer, more money for blizz, that's all.

There is no pressure. If you want D2, play D2 Or play PoE and get bored.

You know what the group of forumers are saying "this game needs repair, needs save"? Because you just want a product to spend your life with. You want a product for years of +4h/day gameplay or even more. Thats all. D3 played casually, from time to time, for fun, after a hard work day, will last for at least a year or two. The only problem is lack of competition and current market is based on it, ppl want to compete with each other, whatever it is moba/pvp or pve showoff/race. D3 has no common competition.

Most of the ideas were pretty obvious and mentioned before, but gathered in one place they formed a sort of a guidance how to make the game better... or at least not as boring and unchallenging as it is atm.

I wish I could play the game this guy described.
Sadly it looks like that blizzard's official position is that game is interesting enough as is. They don't understand that for a vast majority of the players that are still playing it became a sort of a slot game where you click the button and get the reward once per thousand clicks. The only thing that keeps people playing is addiction.

Only read the first part, makes some good points but beside the "less items, better quality" I don't really care about anything, game isn't perfect and never will be but enjoyable enough for me to log on a few hours a day.

Clearly Blizzard doesn't agree with you in a public capacity, so there's no need to white knight for them any longer. The verdict is in and they agree their game blows.

Reading some of his ideas gives me a lot of hope for the future, some of them still make me think they have no clue. I'm up in the air, but it seems more positive than otherwise. Hopefully he's given the powah to actually do some of these things. A lot of his loot ideas would be great. Make items useful, make more stats useful, have less drops and make them actually good.

See I like his proposed Nephalam Power system but apparently the developers don't like it.
I like the item affixes he suggests and getting rid of useless ones but developers don't. Do we really need that many affixes that essentially do the same thing? Theirs like 3 affixes that are basically just slow. Well just bulk them up into slow and then add another affix. Like his suggestions are really cool. I'd love to have an affix on an item that gave me a chance to cast twice. Or an instant kill.

I just don't get why people are falling over for what travis day said. Yes it's an acknowledgment that the game is pretty flawed which is good but he basically said don't expect any radical fixes just expect more of the same we've been doing. They may as well have kept Jay. I mean Jay would have and probably did come to the same conclusions as anyone would have by doing the barest amount of research or just playing the game. At least Jay was good at generating the occasional meme and had the occasionally memorable out burst.

- it has been sold for +12mil of copies, it has been played,
- patches are making community to come back for a while and play,
- about 12k heroes have 100 paragon level, that's alot. Think thank only a part of playerbase has done it.

So your saying its sold 12 million copies and the patches are bringing back people yet only 12k out of the 12 Million possible players have reached paragon 100?

Ya this game doesnt need any saving and Blizzard is just full of shit if they think so

So your saying its sold 12 million copies and the patches are bringing back people yet only 12k out of the 12 Million possible players have reached paragon 100?

Ya this game doesnt need any saving and Blizzard is just full of shit if they think so

Derp derp....

No, actually reaching paragon 100 is a goal of a few. Typical D3 player won't spend that big amount of hours just for the sake of having paragon 100. There is no point at doing this, no fun. Check the number of heroes berween paragon 1 and 100.

This game doesn't need any save or help or anything.
- it has been sold for +12mil of copies, it has been played,
- the RMAH gave them alot of money (probably),
- patches are making community to come back for a while and play,
- about 12k heroes have 100 paragon level, that's alot. Think thank only a part of playerbase has done it.

They are calmly making and expansion, witch will 99% sure sell like 8mil copies, ppl will come back, RMAH again, maybe some new systems will make ppl stay longer, more money for blizz, that's all.

There is no pressure. If you want D2, play D2 Or play PoE and get bored.

You know what the group of forumers are saying "this game needs repair, needs save"? Because you just want a product to spend your life with. You want a product for years of +4h/day gameplay or even more. Thats all. D3 played casually, from time to time, for fun, after a hard work day, will last for at least a year or two. The only problem is lack of competition and current market is based on it, ppl want to compete with each other, whatever it is moba/pvp or pve showoff/race. D3 has no common competition.

Sometimes I think that many ppl here are just addicted.

Sorry you and Ben can parade up and down the street on how good D3 is I don't buy it. I've long uninstalled the game and won't be looking back until an expansion and even then I won't part with my money until the game has more depth then a puddle.

Sorry I've already surpassed my playtime in PoE over D3 I don't even enjoy D3 casually because it's pointless. I don't like a pay 2 win RMAH it defeats the purpose of "dungeon crawling"

No, actually reaching paragon 100 is a goal of a few. Typical D3 player won't spend that big amount of hours just for the sake of having paragon 100. There is no point at doing this, no fun. Check the number of heroes berween paragon 1 and 100.

It's a goal of a few because only a few left play this game. If it were a decent game you'd see more players willing to invest the time and effort to get to lvl 100. Or whatever. You encounter so much blind denial when talking to fans of Blizzard games. It's like a wall.

It's a goal of a few because only a few left play this game. If it were a decent game you'd see more players willing to invest the time and effort to get to lvl 100. Or whatever. You encounter so much blind denial when talking to fans of Blizzard games. It's like a wall.

It's the goal of a few because it happens naturally, just like leveling. When you're farming for gear, you get XP. It just happens. It's not like people aren't playing the game, it's that I think most people aren't focusing 100% on Paragon levels because they come when they come while you're doing what you're already doing.

No, actually reaching paragon 100 is a goal of a few. Typical D3 player won't spend that big amount of hours just for the sake of having paragon 100. There is no point at doing this, no fun. Check the number of heroes berween paragon 1 and 100.

Its been 5 months since they released Paragon levels and your telling me the only ones who have reached 100 are the hardcores? I must let my co-worker, with the 4 kids who plays maybe 1-2 hours a night if hes lucky, know that hes hardcore. D3 hardcore. Might just make his day.

It's a goal of a few because only a few left play this game. If it were a decent game you'd see more players willing to invest the time and effort to get to lvl 100. Or whatever. You encounter so much blind denial when talking to fans of Blizzard games. It's like a wall.

I play for 1-2 hours a day yet I'm only PL 78, reaching 100 is in no way a goal for me cause I'm afraid I'll be bored after it so I'm just doing stuff I enjoy, sometimes I farm essences in Act 2 for days and the other day I do nothing but act 3 runs because I feel like farming some legendary's. If I level up while doing so, great, but It's not my goal by any means to reach 100 asap.

Maybe you just don't fully grasp the absurd amount of time and dedication it takes to reach PL 100, even after what, 6 months? most casual players who play as much as I do will be around lvl 50-80 depending on how they spend their time in-game or even have multiple low level paragon characters.